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“And the risk of stopping at another was too great,” Roark finished for him. “Got it. There’s one bank here, with a north branch and a south branch. The south branch is just up the road on the left, so we’ll stop there next.”
“Thanks, I don’t think I’ll be able to rest easy until it’s taken care of.”
“Then let’s get ‘er done,” Roark said and fired up the car again.
“And now you’ve got me wanting to watch the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.”
“We’ve got it on streaming,” Roark replied. “You can pull it up whenever you’d like.”
“You are completely unbothered by all of this, aren’t you?” Logan said.
“What’s to be bothered about?” Roark asked. “You just added to our family. I know there are a bunch of things to talk about, and we’ll get to them all, but you look exhausted, so how about we let the heavy stuff wait until tomorrow?”
“Works for me.”
“Good, because something tells me whatever number of stops we’re up to now will turn into more by the time we make it to the other side of town.”
“Is that where you live?”
“We live on the North Ridge, with our nearest neighbors, besides Charlie and his mates, almost fifteen minutes away by UTV. They’ve got young pups too, so we’ve been seeing more of them as we get the pups together to play. I think you’ll like them. Raine is somewhat on the quiet side until he gets used to you, so don’t take offense if he shies away or seems distant at first. It’s just his feeling-out phase. He’s one of the pack hunters and works in the community kitchen when he’s not out in the woods. Gabe and Aiden, his mates, write children’s books, which we’ve already stocked up on. Those Floofy stories are out of this world. I bet Wren gets a kick out of hearing them.”
“I love stories,” Wren said.
Roark could see them in the rearview mirror, holding Quackers up so he could see everything too.
“Well, we read one or two every night, so you’ll never go to bed without a story.”
“Yay!”
As he parked to let Logan out, all Roark could think about was getting them home and introducing them to the rest of the family. There would be an adjustment period, to be sure, as they all got to know one another, but it would be worth the struggle to have two more people to love.
“Is your house big?” Wren asked as they headed into the bank to wait for Logan to take care of everything he needed too, Rusty taking Wren’s other hand so they could swing Wren between them.
“I’d say so,” Rusty said. “It has an upstairs and a downstairs and a big den where we watch movies almost every night.”
“What kind of movies?”
“All kinds,” Roark said. “Especially animated ones.”
“What else do you do?” Wren asked.
“Me, personally, I’m in charge of all the sheep and sheep products here at Comet Lake, from wool to mutton.”
“Mmm I like mutton, but Papa says it’s hard to find.”
“It was the same way here until we brought our own sheep and started raising them,” Roark explained. “Now we have plenty of warm blankets, and several of the pack’s weavers have dusted off their looms and spinning wheels and started creating again.”
“There was an elder who used to watch me when I was tiny,” Wren said. “I loved seeing her pass the…oh, I forget what it’s called. But she would pass it back and forth through the yarn on the loom.”
“It’s a shuttle, and yes, they use it to pass the weft back and forth. The warp is what the vertical threads on the loom are called,” Roark explained. “If you’d like to learn more, I know someone who’d be more than happy to teach you all you’d like to know.”
“Are they nice?”
“Very nice,” Roark explained, having picked up on a note of hesitation in Wren’s voice. “Has someone been mean to you while they were trying to teach you something?”
“Sometimes my teachers wouldn’t answer my questions, and Papa didn’t know the answer, so we had to look it up or go to the library if Papa still didn’t understand it after he’d read it. We were always lucky, though. If the librarian didn’t know, they knew someone who did.”
“I’m glad. You let me know if that ever happens here, okay, and we’ll make sure to fix it and get you all the help you need.”
